Levin anticipates AI will continue to be used for drug discovery in 2026. — Pixabay
At nearly 70 years old, artificial intelligence is just coming into its prime.
AI was the most transformative force in technology in 2025, and is also the buzzword on the lips of many futurists, analysts, and investors for 2026.
Fittingly, 2026 will also mark 70 years since the seminal Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI – the 1956 gathering of scientists that is widely considered to be the event during which AI research as a field was born.
Generative AI in particular has moved the sector forward. Even just in the three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, it has transformed the world of business. But given how quickly AI is moving, it can be difficult to determine what that might mean for the future.
Inc. spoke to three futurists with their fingers on the pulse of technology to find out more about what we can expect 2026 to bring.
The death of SEO
Natural language interactions with chatbots via mobile apps and browsers will all but replace the use of conventional Internet search in 2026, Future Today Strategy Group CEO Amy Webb predicts. This means that gone are the days of tabs, links, ads, affiliates and click-throughs in favour of “conversation and intent,” Webb noted in an emailed memo.
“The blunt reality is that people are getting to the information they’re looking for much, much faster than having to sift through endless pages of search results,” she tells Inc.
Webb says this ongoing trend will continue to be transformative for consumers, who can find what they are looking for “faster, easier, better,” thanks to generative AI. For businesses, however, it is likely to pose a problem.
“It’s not entirely clear why AI systems are delivering answers to you and in what order,” Webb says. “All of these companies that have spent money on [SEO] or search engine marketing or making sure they have a strong digital brand and presence – none of that may matter going forward.”
Although a handful of companies have already sprung up to provide GEO – or generative engine optimisation – services, Webb wonders if they are selling “snake oil.” She says GEO businesses would have to have “significantly more data and access to information on how the models were trained than any of those companies are willing to divulge.”
Real-time translation advancements
The possibilities that AI presents for translation have been a focus of the field almost since the beginning. John-Clark Levin, who works as the lead researcher for legendary tech futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, says that the basic science problems have essentially been solved. This year, he predicts, is the year that AI-powered translation services will overcome the hurdles necessary to integrate into platforms where they are needed most. One real-world example of an app where AI translation is already automatically integrated into messaging is Uber.
“I was in Paris earlier this year and found so many more Uber drivers in Paris speak English than I remember,” Levin says. “Then I realised that’s because I’m saying, ‘Good day,’ and they’re reading, ‘Bonjour’ and vice versa.”
A transformative use case of this technology is on freelance marketplaces like Upwork. Today, skilled coders in countries like Pakistan face significant language barriers that limit their abilities to earn the types of wages that English-speaking IT workers do. But automatic, integrated AI translation could change all that, Levin says.
Furthermore, Levin expects to see even more advancements in translation for video chat applications. In 2026, he says it is likely there could be a demonstration of technology that provides real-time voice translation on video chat applications with real-time lip syncing. That means, for example, that if Levin was speaking in English to an audience in Beijing, they would hear his voice speaking Mandarin, as well as see his lips “making the shapes of Mandarin sounds at the same time in real-time.”
Levin says that the impressive technology will likely be too pricey to deploy at scale in 2026. (Akool, which topped the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, offers technology similar to what Levin is talking about.)
Authenticity and analogue aesthetics
Anatola Araba, founder of R3imagine Story Lab, anticipates the preferences of younger generations driving up demand for what she called “phygital” – a hybrid of physical and digita – experiences. (Araba says R3imagine Story Lab specialises in this type of storytelling that blends physical worlds with digital elements.) Advancements in technology like augmented, virtual and mixed reality, as well as AI, can take this to the next level. Phygital experiences can be a boon for brands looking to drive engagement, she says, while also urging companies to be culturally sensitive when crafting these types of immersive worlds.
“In this age of digital overload, we see people craving this real sense of connection with others – especially younger GenZ audiences that want to be more analog,” she says.
Speaking of digital overload, Araba anticipates a surge in the analogue aesthetic in marketing and advertising. It’s no secret that GenZ seems to crave nostalgia, but Araba says the thirst for the analogue – think penpals, ripped paper collages, vinyl, and film photography – is also a backlash to the uncanny perfection of AI. She anticipates brands jumping on board with a trend that is already taking over social media platforms like Pinterest.
“In marketing or in advertising, that authentic voice is what draws us the most,” she says. “Similarly in generating brand assets, that feeling of being human or aesthetically analog, even if you use AI to do it, is definitely drawing everyone, especially the younger generation.”
AI for health care
Levin anticipates AI will continue to be used for drug discovery in 2026. He notes that there is already a drug for a deadly lung disease that was designed end-to-end by AI and successfully completed a phase 2A clinical trial. Although he doesn’t anticipate full Food and Drug Administration approval of that or any AI-designed drug in 2026, he predicts “notable successes in earlier stage trials” as well as tools getting “amazing results” for preclinical work.
Webb also anticipates generative AI making a substantial mark on the world of biotech and health care in 2026, through capabilities like DNA and RNA editing, and protein engineering. She calls it “generative biology,” and, like Levin, says she thinks existing tools like Nvidia’s Evo 2 and DeepMind’s AlphaGenome will be used in 2026 to rapidly iterate new drugs, as well as make other discoveries.
“It very likely portends new options in how we treat disease, come up with climate resistant vegetables and nuts, and create synthetic organisms,” she says “It signals that we are going to see the true birth of the bio economy.”
Araba predicts that sleep optimisation with the assistance of AI and connected devices like Apple Watches and Oura Rings will become a greater area of focus in 2026, building on research showing a strong link between longevity and sleep quality. She also sees an increase in the use of AI for medical note taking, but cautions that AI can potentially reinforce systemic biases in the medical field.
Robots making us coffee
Nothing says the future like robots, and Levin and Webb have some ideas about how the field of robotics might evolve in 2026.
Levin anticipates 2026 being the year that a humanoid robot could pass Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s coffee test. The coffee test is a challenge adopted from comments Wozniak made in a 2007 interview, and is considered by some to be an alternative to the Turing Test of computer intelligence. If a robot is capable of solving the so-called coffee test, it is capable of entering an unfamiliar kitchen and making a cup of coffee, which requires not only the ability to walk and move with dexterity, but also the use of computer vision and reasoning to locate ingredients and operate machinery.
Webb, however, thinks of humanoid robots as something of a distraction from how robots will really integrate into society, thanks to advancements in physical AI. Webb paints a picture of a scenario she finds “more plausible” in the next few years than a humanoid robot walking into a kitchen to make coffee. She anticipates a cooler-shaped delivery bot, something like the ones already making deliveries in some US cities, unlocking a small robot door in a consumer’s home with a code, entering the kitchen, taking inventory of missing items, creating a list for a person to approve, and then restocking what’s missing.
“It is very, very, very important for everybody to decouple ‘robot’ from ‘human-like form factor,’” she says, adding that hinging hopes for robotics on humanoid form factors may mean missing out on other miraculous innovations already underway.
The bubble will burst but it might not matter
Are we in an AI bubble? That’s the question on everyone’s minds, including Levin’s. He says it all depends on the time horizon. Amazon, he says, would have been considered a casualty of the dot-com bubble if an investor had bought shares in 1999 and sold them in 2001. But if they held onto those same shares for 15 years, that investor would have substantially won out.
“It is more likely than not that there will be a market correction in AI between here and when we finally get to artificial general intelligence, but on the other side of that, there will be enormous value created,” Levin says.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be pain. Levin says what could contribute to a market correction is the peak capability of generative AI remaining far enough ahead of the reliability of various tools and platforms that they are still not widely adopted by businesses. Companies that are likely to be hit the hardest by a market correction are those that build AI wrapper apps, whereas frontier AI labs, particularly those with scale like Google and Meta, will likely be able to “spend through the correction.” In fact, he says, those companies might even welcome a correction.
“If I were Google or Meta thinking about the prospects of this, they would almost like to see a correction make it harder for OpenAI and Anthropic to raise money, knowing that they could just spend through it and hopefully get an advantage on the way to AGI,” he says.
Finally, a word of warning
Although predictions from Araba, Levin, and Webb often look at the positive side of what AI and other technological breakthroughs can mean for society, Levin also sees several potential downsides in the coming year.
AI job disruption isn’t just a future concern, he says, it’s something that’s happening now through disinvestment rather than displacement. Although AI today isn’t necessarily powerful or reliable enough to replace human workers in many instances, companies are starting to acknowledge that it one day will be. This is contributing to a trend of disinvestment in certain industries where leaders believe AI may advance more quickly than they can recoup an expensive investment.
Two sectors Levin flags as rife for this type of change are call centres and Hollywood. He pointed, for example, to Tyler Perry’s 2024 decision to pause an US$800mil (RM3.25bil) investment in his Atlanta studio after the release of OpenAI’s video generator tool, Sora.
Levin also says that 2026 could be the year when there is a major safety event involving AI. There could, he says, be a major hack or cyberattack or an incident in which “a deployed LLM is caught scheming against humans.” And as furore builds around AI, he also unfortunately predicts a risk of AI-motivated violence.
“There’s enough alarm about AI that the pool of people with violent tendencies and the pool of people who are alarmed enough to lash out at someone or something in the AI space are both growing and will likely start to overlap,” he says. – Inc./Tribune News Service
